McGoogan News

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Jaipreet Virdi, PhD, will present the 14th annual Richard B. Davis, MD, PhD, History of Medicine Lecture on April 14 from noon to 1 p.m. The lecture, titled “Negotiating Normalcy: Deafness Cures in American History,” will be a hybrid event located at the College of Public Health auditorium, room 3013 and via Zoom (registration required).  An American Sign Language (ASL) interpreter will be present and Zoom captioning will be available.  

During the late nineteenth century, entrepreneurs began to glut the direct-to-consumer medical market with a plethora of remedies they professed could miraculously cure deafness. They claimed their medicines and machines fostered a world of unbridled optimism for providing “hope” to deaf ears. Even as medical specialists denounced these “cure-all” treatments as quackery in its finest form, the messages of restoring hearing would transfer over to the hearing aid industry.  

Focusing on the marketing of cures for deafness—hearing trumpets, electrotherapy apparatuses, and hearing aids—this presentation unravels the many ways deaf people sought to restore or gain hearing. This history provides a broad context for understanding the lived experiences of deaf people and how cultural pressures of normalcy significantly stigmatized deafness. 

Dr. Virdi is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Delaware. A historian of medicine, technology, and disability, her research focuses on the ways medicine and technology impact people with disability. She is author of Hearing Happiness: Deafness Cures in History (University of Chicago Press, 2020), co-editor of Disability and the Victorians: Attitudes, Legacies, Interventions (Manchester University Press, 2020), and has published articles on diagnostic technologies, audiometry, and the medicalization of deafness. 

The library will hold a drawing for Dr. Virdi’s book, Hearing Happiness: Deafness Cures in History. Entries can be made online.  

The Richard B. Davis, MD, PhD, History of Medicine Lectureship brings national experts to the UNMC campus to discuss the history of medicine, in support of special collections at the McGoogan Library, including rare books and works on the history of medicine. The lectureship is supported through an endowed fund given by the late Richard B. Davis (1926-2010), MD, PhD, who was a UNMC faculty member from 1969 to 1994 and professor emeritus of internal medicine at UNMC. Dr. Davis and his wife, Jean, provided support for the lectureship out of his longstanding interest in the history of medicine. 

Boxed lunches will be available to the first 50 in-person attendees. 

Register now for the library’s April and May instructional sessions:

April 

Overview of Fetal images from the McGoogan Library Rare Book Collection  

April 7, noon-1 p.m. 

View illustrations of the fetus from the McGoogan Library Rare Book Collection.  Erin Torell, McGoogan Health Sciences Library Rare Book Librarian, will share books from the 16th-19th centuries. Learn about the artists, anatomists, and the 18th century changes in the roles of men and women in midwifery.  

Writing a Data Management Plan 

April 19, noon-1 p.m.  

This webinar will use the new NIH DMSP 2023 template created with DMPTool to guide you through drafting a Data Management and Sharing Plan. We will address the major components of writing a data management plan, which includes choosing data types, describing the structure of your data, and the challenges and benefits of data sharing.

May 

Preserving Family Treasures: Personal Papers, Photos, Scrapbooks, and More  

May 4, noon-1 p.m.  

What do I do with all this stuff? In this session, you will learn about basic care of your family treasures such as loose photos, letters, scrapbooks and photo albums. DiAnna Hemsath, McGoogan Health Sciences Library Archivist, will provide practical tips and solutions for organization and safe storage of your family history for future generations. 

The semester is “rolling” right along, and students have been working hard. We want to help students get off campus and relax! McGoogan Health Sciences Library is giving away gift cards to local bowling establishments as a much-deserved study break.

Enter to win using our Wellness Weekend Form. Entries can be submitted March 20-23, 2023. Winners will be randomly chosen from each UNMC campus and notified on March 24. 

Beginning March 1, visitors to the Wigton Heritage Center’s American College of Surgeons Rare Book Gallery on Level 5 of Wittson Hall will see eight new selections. The selections on display feature books from the Hiram Winnett Orr, MD, Rare Book Collection and the Leon S. McGoogan Health Sciences Library Rare Book Collection. The book topics include anatomy, surgical instruments, obstetrics, and women’s health.  

The featured anatomy books were created by Scottish anatomists: 

• John Bell’s Engravings, explaining the anatomy of the bones, muscles, and joints (1794) includes macabre illustrations created by Bell, reflecting the popularity of Gothic literature of the period. 
• In A system of anatomical plates (1825), Bell’s student John Lizars created illustrations beautiful and precise in their execution. 
• Man: his structure and physiology (1857) was written by the infamous Robert Knox, known for his role in purchasing bodies from the murderers Burke and Hare  for use at his anatomy school. Knox’s book is a flap anatomy book with movable parts to display different layers of anatomy. 

Surgical instruments are features of three of the books from the Hiram Winnett Orr, MD, Rare Book Collection, on permanent loan from the American College of Surgeons. 

• Surgical Operations: In the Pentateuch and other distinct surgical operations (1666) by Hieronymous Fabricius ab Aquapendente highlights illustrations of surgical instruments used in trepanation and lithotomy.  
• Johannes Scultetus, a contemporary of Fabricius, is represented with Kheiroplotheke seu D. Joannis Sculteti . . . Armamentarium chiurgicum (1656) featuring illustrations of surgical instruments and images of how to use them for trepanation, tracheotomy, and mastectomy. 
• The works of that famous chirurgion Ambrose Parey (1634) is an English translation of French surgeon Ambroise Paré’s work on everything from surgery to distillation to cryptid animals.  

The final two selections feature women’s health and obstetrics: 

• Yoshitora Utagawa’s triptych, Fubu no on o shiru zu, “Realize one’s parental love” (circa 1880) features Japanese woodblock prints of the ten lunar months of gestation. The beautifully colored images include flowers representative of each month.   
• The ideal woman, for maidens-wives-mothers (1915) by Mary Ries Melendy contains information and advice for the different stages of women’s lives. Melendy graduated from a homeopathic medical college and an eclectic medical college in Chicago. After graduation, she taught on diseases of women and children at a naturopathy school in Chicago.  

Can’t make it to the UNMC Omaha campus? Not to worry! You can visit the online gallery to learn more about the authors/creators, view images from the books, and learn more about the other 10,000+ rare books housed at the McGoogan Library.   

To book a research appointment, email history@unmc.edu or request a tour of the Wigton Heritage Center here.